


knight of misrule

by gatheringbones



Category: Legend of Dragoon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Femslash, Genderswap, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 14:14:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatheringbones/pseuds/gatheringbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the moon's children fall one by one and a demon goes hunting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

 

> _"With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement."_
> 
> _Erich Maria Remarque_

**0.-0.-0**

It has been one hundred and eight years to the day since Charle awoke with this particular weight of dread in her chest, but she is not surprised by this.

She fancies herself too old for surprises. But dread, no. One can never be too old to dread.

 

**0.-0.-0**

She is in her garden when her attendant finds her, tending her roses.

Pruning has always appealed to Charle, even if she could never quite put her finger on why. She supposed it was simply more Wingly sensibilities- encouraging growth in whatever direction she saw fit, and calmly discouraging whatever pathways were ill-suited to her ambitions. She was not always comfortable with ambition, but then, she is not her brother. It is a comfortable way of phrasing which qualities she lacks, as if the ones she does possess were all that was left over once her brother had had his share.

In any case, she does not care to cultivate the rarest cuttings. Some weights are best left by the wayside if one could help it, and obligation to succeed has ever been one of them.

She prunes her roses, which she is beginning to suspect she cannot help from doing, and she thinks of her brother, which is something she has never seemed to be able to keep herself from entirely.

Melbu was an unquiet ghost at best, but then, very little about him was prone to sitting quietly and waiting for the end. It did her no harm to remember in any case. Turning over memories always wears them down, and this is one she wishes especially to have worn down to safe, comfortable curves. Here, in the clean air and perpetual, sandpaper sunshine of Ulara, she would grant him this.

If there used to be a stab of shame at the thought that Melbu, personally, would not think much of pruning roses at her age, there is no longer. Melbu died young, after all. Not everyone had that luxury.

She has distracted herself. This distresses her.

She had willfully allowed herself to remember, and now she can't even go through with it.

She pauses in her work, which she has only just barely started and suspects that she won't make much of a dent in anyways, casting back through the warped and straining hallways of her memory.

 _He wrote wholly adequate poetry_ , she thinks at last, holding the thought pointed carefully away, and while it may be a knife, at least she has it by the handle. It pleases her. This sense of control.

On some impulse, she looks up. It is a habit of hers, impossible to cure. Like a wary hen scanning the skies for the silhouette of a hawk.

The instinct is useless. The threat hangs where it has ever hung.

Charle never stole her brother's toys when she was young, and she resents her being responsible for them now. But it is an old resentment, and familiar enough that it is almost like greeting an old friend. She is comforted by it.

This one small, shameful indulgence is all she is allowed before the world intrudes.

Her attendant approaches, her hair veiled from the sun, and her features guarded. Charle does not understand this more recent affectation by the younger women, especially when her attendant's hair is still blue-white and shining. She, on the other hand, had woken up to find her hair gone dull and colorless ages ago, without having ever really noticed its transformation.

Charle picks up her shears, more out of contrariness more than anything else. The heat reflecting off of the white stone makes her temples throb.

She does not care to skirt the issue.

"Is it time, then?" she asks without turning her head, reaching down through the tangle of one rose bush where she can see a dead shoot rising from the main stem. There is something infinitely satisfying about simply snipping it off. The pressure in her temples eases.

"No," says the attendant.

The word is bald and inelegant, and Charle notices the fear slipping underfoot. She frowns. Fear is a luxury like any other, and one she can barely afford at that. What right does she have to it?

She glances skyward again, sweat cooling on her forehead.

One glance is enough to reassure her. Enough to curb an admittedly unkind impulse to rebuke. She does not want to think of herself as too old for kindness, no matter what reality might have to say otherwise.

"We have time," she says simply, and kinder than she might have. Kindness is less familiar than resentment. She trusts it less.

Her attendant says nothing.

Charle raises her head. Annoyance is tiresome, but ever quick to appear when called. "Then does Caron something in particular of me?"

Her tone is snappish. She knows this is not the case. But something in her that is perverse enough to remember her brother, today of all days, wants to hear it from the woman's own lips.

"No," says her attendant again, and there is true nervousness there.

This in and of itself is interesting enough that Charle relents.

"Then?" she says, gentler than before.

Her attendant stares back at her without speaking, her eyes large and bottomless and somehow blameless in their stupidity. Charle feels the slip of the woman's control, a crack in the wall that every civilized Wingly must uphold in order to maintain a sort of silence in their own heads. She feels it, and she knows already what they are actually discussing.

She turns the shears over in her hands.

"Has it failed already then?" she asks mildly.

It wouldn't surprise her. Spells these days are notoriously unreliable. They require constant concentration, constant upkeep, and it is easy, so easy, not to concentrate on what lies sleeping deep in the center of Ulara, turning restlessly in its bed like a blood clot in the city's heart. While there are spells to keep a subject dormant and dreaming for years- decades, even- there is only so much one can do when one is being actively fought, inch by inch, by something determined to wake, no matter the cost.

Her attendant shakes her head mutely, and something in the middle of Charle's back unclenches like a fist. It was one thing to say that more time was to be had, and another to have it confirmed.

But then-

"We," begins the attendant, and at the sound, the fingers of that fist curl gently closed once more. "We keep hearing-"

She swallows. "…Noises."

 _Noises_ was such a decorous word. It encompassed so much, and yet said nothing at all, to the point where she is nearly soothed by it. She supposes this was her servant's intention, the word's sheer inadequacy aside. Charle does not fault the woman for wrapping her hands around the first tool to come to hand, when any other would hardly do the job justice.

"That's to be expected," says Charle dismissively, even though the act of sweeping this particular discomfort under the carpet nearly makes even her recoil in disgust.

The woman surprises her by reaching again, fumbling for words that no proper Wingly could express and settling for whatever comes closest. "And," she says, even more awkwardly than before, and at this breach of propriety, Charle cannot help but be transfixed. She recognizes how obscene this impulse is within her, this voyeur's urge. She welcomes this distraction.

The attendant drops her eyes. Fixes them on the white flagstones beneath their feet.

"Screaming," she says finally.

_Ah._

Charle closes her shears decidedly, and for lack of ideas, picks fretfully at the hem of her sleeve.

They had even less time than she thought.

The city is quiet around them. But for the rustle of water and greenery, they might be the only two living things there. A city of the dead, if even a true city at all. And even though Charle has seen the real city of the dead, and knows that her Ulara, her greatest and perhaps only treasure, is different, she would be hard pressed to say why exactly.

She feels her attendant's discomfort and unhappiness like sand scouring against raw and shrinking flesh.

It upset them all, the creature sleeping in the city's heart. It offends their sensibilities- the same sensibilities that drives them to such thrilling pursuits as pruning roses. Winglies adore order above all else. Decorum. A wound must be lanced and drained, and cauterized if need be, not left to fester and rot.

Children were to be born in their due time.

Death was to be politely delayed, but not forever.

 _What pretty frauds we make,_ she thinks abruptly.

It is not very kind, but perhaps she has outgrown kindness after all.

She wipes her forehead with the back of her hand, then stops and examines it critically. She takes in the skin, thin as paper. The pearly white of slowly-swelling joints shining through flesh.

The thought that comes next is neither particularly kind nor particularly heartfelt. Merely dull.

 _When I die_   _there will be no one left with the power to control him._

The idea of her death does not galvanize her. She fixes her eyes on her roses once more, and what was once a harmless, absorbing task now wearies her beyond measure.

She was, right, of course. Her efforts haven't left so much as a dent.

She changes her mind. She will return to her rooms.

A slight darkening of the sky.

"Mistress," says her attendant, a bubble of fear in her throat, and she sounds so  _young_  when she says it, so hopelessly young, as nothing in Ulara has been allowed to be young since her people first fled here. Despite herself, Charle is fascinated by it, this sudden bloom of youth, and so she looks.

Her attendant's eyes are fixed heavenwards, and Charle knows what she will see before she turns- it is pointless, her turning to look, but while she may in fact be too old for surprises, she is never too old for futile gestures.

She turns. Looks.

Before their eyes, the Moon flushes slowly, gorgeously red, from pole to pole.

It is a throbbing, violent red that almost seems to pulse in time with some inner heartbeat. She half expects it to drip down on the earth below, drop by expectant drop.

She feels it, they both do, when the spell breaks. They feel the effect of that awakening roll out across the city, somehow damaging everything it touches.

She feels herself growing older.

When their eyes connect once more, the attendant's face is brittle and unguarded. Charle is not above feeling some form of satisfaction at that. She wondered what that said about her own Wingly sensibilities.

She rose to her feet, slower than she might have once. Slower than she even would have as early as this morning.

"I will be in my chambers. Have tea brought." She pauses. "Wine, rather."

"Yes, Mistress," says her attendant, grasping gratefully at the familiar role being offered to her.

Charle considers leaving her gardening garb on throughout, and then just as quickly decides not to.

A little decorum is in order after all.

 

 

**0.-0.-0**

The windows of her solar look out onto the city, and through them the Moon can be seen, a carmine smear in a low haze of cloud. The red light washes across the white stone of Ulara like a bloody tide. Like the beaches surrounding Aglis the day her mother's city fell.

She sips her wine. Her fingers do not shake.

The room is deserted. Her other attendants are absent, and only the one sconce on the wall is lit. Shadows flood the corners. She sits in her chair in a sober gown, with no jewels in her ears or in her hair. The Winglies of old used to flaunt her wealth, and she figures the more disparity between her and her former peers the better.

She had been considered very wealthy once. This shouldn't comfort her, but it does.

The clink of steel reaches her ears. With strength of will, she refrains from flinching.

She wonders, briefly, who among her people was tasked with armoring him. It was so difficult these days, as he could not bear the touch of so much as a hand. A human hand, perhaps, but she no longer has human servants. She wonders briefly where one might go about acquiring one these days, before she remembers that those markets are now closed to her.

In a way, she misses the novelty of human servants.

She notes her own rising fright, and wonders if she should bother hiding it.

The sound of his approach pauses at the door. Her heart beats evenly in her chest. Her tongue fits smoothly in the roof of her mouth. She caresses her awareness of these details, like a small cat in her lap.

Charle forgets, often, that humans lack the walls that Winglies must erect in order to survive. They need not constantly distract themselves, zero in on the tiniest minutiae so as to drown out the rest. She knows that without her own walls, in this moment, that she would be crushed against her chair with every cell in her body screaming.

She retreats, even so. She thinks,  _Melbu had the softest, finest hair, you know, soft as Mother's. Soft as a girl's._

The handle turns, and the last dragoon, Emperor Diaz's finest knight, walks into her chambers.

He crosses the room. His armor notched and red, and fitted to him like a second skin.

She swallows. The scent of blood is not physical, but overpowering nonetheless, and rolls off him in waves.

His face, no, she cannot bear to look at his face. In any case she does not quite know what he will do upon meeting her eyes. He is, in many ways, an unknown. Distantly, she remembers him as a man who would most likely not stoop to killing an old woman in her solar, but then she remembers that that man is well and truly dead, and that the creature standing before her has smothered children with his hands. Clumsily at first, no doubt, but better with practice.

With enough practice one can become skilled at nearly anything.

She forgets not to look.

He turns his eyes up to hers, and they are the color of cities burning, of empires laid waste, of infants laid tenderly down to die of exposure in the snow.

Her heart wavers unsteadily. A fawn on newborn legs, liable to snap. The smell of blood continues to fill her nostrils. Winglies do not, as a rule, vomit, but the worst laws she has ever broken are standing before her now. She feels liberated, somehow.

"Zieg Feld," she states, grounding him with his full name. Binding him to her service.

"I require another hunt of you."

 

 

 

**0.-0.-0**


	2. Chapter 2

**Knight of Misrule**

 

> ****
> 
> _“ What the Chronics are - or most of us - are machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.”_
> 
> _ Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest_

**0.-0.-0**

Mille Seseau burns.

Five villages are destroyed nearly overnight, a straggling, lunatic line leading inexorably down to the sea. Furni is the last, hundreds of souls baked alive in the little clay oven houses of the city while from its harbor a ship scuttles out across the ocean.

They leave the bulk of their supplies behind in their haste; they are not in the least prepared for a winter at sea. But the falling snow is already streaking the sails grey with ash and as they pull free from the harbor the horizon glows like a burning coal. There is no talk of turning back.

Princess Louvia has hair the color burnt wheat, and is all of three days old. She is quiet, but healthy, and well-formed. In the city, they hailed her birth as the coming of a goddess.

The captain has no opinions regarding goddesses. He gives the wet nurse his first mate’s cabin and writes in his log with an unsteady hand,  _No harbor is safe._

**0.-0.-0**

They last five weeks at sea.

When he catches up, they are out of water, and out of all food that is not preserved in brine.

The volley of arrows they send his way veer widely from their target. Many of the men are too weak to bear arms at all. They are badly dehydrated, and wretchedly sick in some cases, but to their credit, they are patriots. To a man, they are patriots.

Their deaths are but the work of a highly methodical moment. The only one that affords him trouble is the captain.  He had stationed himself at the door to the first mate’s cabin with saber in hand and a glint in his eye that two weeks of halved rations, then quartered, then eliminated have not extinguished.

The captain is disciplined. He allows himself to be impaled through the chest so as to entrap the sword and foul any chance of blocking a return strike, only to have his knife skitter off of Wingly steel.

His jaw sets, his face expressionless, and he dies without comment or reproach.

The foretop is completely still now; the sails slack, becalmed. Not so much as the cry of a gull breaks the silence.

Zieg bends his head and steps over the captain’s corpse on his way into the cabin.

The interior is suffocatingly close. Rank air and the smell of sickness rise up like a blow to the face.

He finds the wet-nurse attempting to grind rock-hard ship’s biscuit into the last of the water and weeping badly. Her lips are white with dehydration.

Blind from crying, she takes him for a crewman. 

“Help,” she says. “Please help me. She won’t eat. Please help.”

She hands the baby up to him, hysterical and unthinking, and after a moment of stiffness, he takes it.

He looks down at the Princess Louvia, holding her awkwardly in the crook of one arm in the manner of men unused to infants. He does not speak.

Louvia’s burnt-wheat hair is limp and dirty. They could not afford the water to wash her, and they had since learned not to use seawater. All color is gone from her cheeks.

 But for the murmur of a pulse there at the soft point in her skull, she could scarcely be alive at all.

He considers the small shape in his hands for a moment more, then soberly presses his thumb down on her throat until the appropriate amount of time has passed, and hands her back.

The nurse does not notice, or perhaps it is beyond her comprehension. She takes the bundle, her arms shaking from the weight. She smoothes a hand over Louvia’s unwashed hair, crooning. The babe is no more silent than when he arrived.

He lingers a moment more, an awkward, overly-tall figure in the overwhelming stench of that room.

He steps over the captain’s body once more on his way out.

**0.-0.-0**

He is no longer human, and no longer sane by even the loosest stretch of the term. What he is even the Winglies would be hard pressed to say. He is ageless. And he is solidly, unquestionably, irrevocably mad.

He returns to Ulara on the back of the wind, with the ash of Mille Seseau in the crevices of his armor and in the roots of his hair and trapped in the creases underneath his eyes. The instinct that tugged him to Neet to Furni and then to a becalmed ship in the western seas has gone dead in his chest.  He has cut loose the soul of the Moon- he felt it pass through his hands. His task complete, he does as he has been ordered and returns to the hands of his masters. And they, in turn, welcome him home as they have been ordered.

They do not touch him with their bare hands; they know better than to do this. They remove his armor, piece by interlocking piece, and treat what wounds he has picked up in his travels. There is an arrowhead lodged in the bone of his hip, with streaks of poison spiraling outward. They carve it loose, and burn the infection from his blood with what magic they still possess. He does not flinch.

They robe him in the colors he wore as a man, the soft and sober greys and reds of Diaz’s house, and he does not speak, just as they do not speak to him. They wash the ash from his hair, from his face. He is as he ever was, a man scarcely past the reach of his twenties, but his eyes are sunken, the lines riven deep. No one will ever mistake him for a man of twenty again.

They remove his sword before anything else, of course. In the early years, they had feared he would turn it on himself. Once Charle had excised that urge from his breast, they feared that she had also removed his compunction against killing an unarmed enemy.  She hadn’t, or at least not intentionally.

She had, however, added others, as their fear and understanding of what they had created grew, but still they take care to remove his sword.

When they finish, he is as clean and harmless as Wingly hands can make him, and as silent as when he arrived. They leave him at last standing in his windowless room, facing the door, his face empty, his thoughts empty, his heart thudding slow and dull in his chest until Charle appears.

She had been summoned from her bed when they had first spotted his light in the desert.  In the early centuries of his duty, she had brought attendants with her. She had worn the finery of her office, her mother’s jewels in her hair, the lost scent of Aglis on her skin.

She shuffles into the room, her robe belted awkwardly around her waist, her bone-white hair escaping from its net. There is something fretful and skittish about the way she moves.

It is some time before she finally settles on the traditional words.

“Were you successful?”

He does not blink; she cannot remember when last she saw him blink. Then his voice, stripped bare of all inflection, breaks the silence.

“Yes.”

She relaxes as much as she is able. Her hand comes up to tuck her hair fitfully behind her ear. Her face is narrow, pinched, and entirely her brother’s. Some note of diplomacy returns to her, and despite herself, she sounds almost cordial.

 “Will you sleep then?”

Another long moment. Another lurch of a reply. “Yes.”

She does not expend further words on him. She turns and leaves that stuffy, dimly lit little room without comment, returning to her solar and her bed and her restless dreams.

Zieg remains standing.

They have left the collar on his neck untouched, though they cleaned the ring of grime from his skin around it. It is nothing more than a ring of black leather secured by a narrow steel buckle that has long since rusted shut.

And deep, deep in the center of his chest, the faint itch he felt ever since stepping free of the ship’s deck wraps itself a little more around his heart.

**0.-0.-0**

He is the nightmare of centuries.

He is Soa’s wrath. He is the red demon lying dreaming in the center of the earth, rising snarling every one hundred and eight years to rip the Moon’s children from its breast before they can begin to suckle.

His is, he was, Diaz’s greatest general, the conqueror of Aglis, and the sole remaining dragoon.

But above all else, he is a murderer of children. And when he sleeps, he does not dream.

The spell is simple enough, and for many centuries, it was not beyond even the smallest of the remaining Winglies. Even as age and unregulated breeding stripped their magic away, there were still those who could maintain a simple binding. The stasis is not to extend his life, for the years allotted to him are as those of a dragon’s. He need not fear the ravages of age. Disease will not claim him, and nothing save a sword strike will fell him. Diaz’s gift is a powerful one, and one they will forever fear him for.

Few from Ulara were alive when Aglis fell burning into the sea, but a handful or so remain. They said that the entire divine house of Frahma, save brother and sister, had drowned in water and flame in the space of a single night. Vengeance, some said, for the death of the Dragoon of water. They are well aware that he could transform Ulara into a slag of melted rock at any time he wished; all but the very youngest have no illusions as to the true extent of Charle’s control.

(A younger Zieg would have told them differently. The conquest of Aglis had been the result of a bitter, exhausting campaign that had eaten Damia and eaten Syuveil and spat Kanzas out mad and broken. Zieg had been but a sword whose hilt had rested firmly in Diaz’s hand.)

It occurs to some of them that he would, in fact, be very interested in revenge were he still something resembling human, but the very idea is ridiculous. He is empty. And to a Wingly, who spends every waking minute casting out and looking for their own reflection in every sentient mind in reach, that emptiness is as chilling as a knife blade. They keep him asleep because that is the only way they can bear him.

To them, he is a horror.

 From the time of the Divine Dragon to the Never-Setting Moon, they have had but one way of dealing with horrors.

**0.-0.-0**

When he wakes for the first time, no one quite knows what to make of it.

They find him on the south eastern outskirts of the city, barefoot and bareheaded and staring into the desert as the sandpaper wind scours him clean.

He does not resist being led back to his chamber. He does not resist when they retrace the sigils and lock him back down into stasis. 

He also does not answer any of their questions, and this is unacceptable.

Charle fled her solar when word first reached her that he had been seen walking through the city. She doesn’t stop until she reaches his chambers, where she finds him just as she left him- asleep, unmoving, and dead to the world. He is still wearing his collar. That, at least, is unchanged.

She flattens her lips and considers him for a moment before raising her fingertips and reinforcing the spell with a jab of magic, casting a poisonous glance towards the ones tasked with overseeing it.

She brushes off all inquiries without discussion. He is asleep. He has woken up before his time in the past, but he has always returned to sleep without qualm, just as he did now. There is nothing further to discuss. She returns to her solar.

 When he rises again six months later, the inquiries become considerably harder to ignore.

**0.-0.-0**

For eleven thousand years, the process by which he has hunted down and cut loose the Moon Child has not changed.

He has sacked cities. He has broken entire tribes. He has laid infants down in snow banks to let exposure do its work and he has strangled six-week-old little girls in the holds of ships.

He feels them, wherever they are, no matter how far they are away. It is all he feels.

He lays in the darkness of his chamber- not sleeping exactly, but to the Winglies there is no difference- and he ponders the nagging itch in his chest that time and distance have not erased. He turns the details of his last hunt over and over again in the reaches of his mind and wonders which of these details seems so ill-fitting. It isn’t enough to start his hunt anew, and it’s barely enough to pierce though the effect of the collar.

It is an itch, nothing more. One that he can ignore at any time he wishes, and he does, largely, ignore it. He is no longer a man of many passions, and he has no passion for curiosity.

But when the itch grows too great- as well it must, as it is all that he has to occupy himself with- he rises.

He can do no else.

He makes his way through the white cobbled streets of Ulara, where long ago he met a woman with black hair and black eyes and lost his heart long before Charle so much as touched it. He stands on the farthest reach of the city’s walls and stares at the only direction that speaks to him until he is finally collected by his horrified guardians once more.

Doing this does nothing to assuage his doubt. It does nothing to suggest that his doubt may be well founded. But the itch persists.

It doesn’t matter if he did, in fact, cut loose a piece of the Moon’s soul there in the bowels of that doomed ship, because he cannot shake the suspicion that it was just a piece.

**0.-0.-0**

The next seventeen years see a city slowly driven mad by fear.

It doesn’t occur to them that Zieg has little to no interest in burning Ulara to the ground, and would frankly be confused by the suggestion. It doesn’t occur to them that their ability to keep him asleep has always depended on his willingness to humor them, and that willingness stands little chance against the first flicker of curiosity he has felt in millennia.

And after a certain amount of time has passed, it doesn’t occur to them that there is more at work than simply Charle’s perceived incompetence.

He wakes once, twice, even three times in the space of each year. He wakes after the sigils have been reinforced, rewritten, and re-cast again and again over his unresisting head. The spells that bound the Divine Dragon in his day are lost, or the next time Zieg woke it would be under the weight of ensorcelled chain. In any case, they would have to actually lay their hands on him to place the working on him, and they all know better than to do this.

They think he will murder them all in their sleep.

They think that this is the harbinger of their downfall, that this is but one more damning sign that their magic is becoming lost to them forever.

They think of Melbu Frahma, of the breeding policies in the Crystal City that they threw their empire into civil war to denounce, and they wonder if they made the wrong choice somewhere. And when they look at Charle Frahma and see an old, frightened, stupid woman who will not give them answers, they see nothing to suggest that she was the right choice.

The final time Zieg wakes, they find him in the garden once more.

They find him staring south and a little east, his hair shining dusty gold in the light of the desert dawn and his eyes a hollow blue.

And this time, he is wearing his sword.

The uproar this causes is no longer something that Charle can ignore or deflect, but Zieg’s attention is so thoroughly compromised that it may as well be taking place someone else entirely.

He merely stands as he has always stood, his eyes fixed on the same patch of desert.

He reaches up and grips the dragon’s soul at his chest. He cannot see the resulting leap of a glow, but he feels it.

He is nearly sure now. Nearly. But even as a man, he had never been one to act without impetus.

He allows himself to be herded back to his chamber. He allows them to remove his sword- carefully, without touching him- and he offers no resistance.

If they were to ask him- which they never have, as it is common knowledge that the last dragoon does not speak and most likely lacks the faculties for it in the first place- he would have said that he was thinking.

**0.-0.-0**

If Charle had had a single night’s good sleep in the last seventeen years, perhaps their meeting would have gone differently.

As it is, when she sweeps into his chamber, she is finally too angry to be frightened. She is finally angry enough to be stupid.

He is not asleep when she enters the room; he is not as she left him. He is sitting on the edge of the bed, still smelling of the rose garden, and this is enough to tip her anger into outright fury.

Her politeness, nevertheless, doesn’t slip so much as a notch.

  
“Your servants tell me you cannot sleep.”

Her phrasing is impeccable. Her choice of words, deliberate. Her hair is bound tight to her temples, not a strand out of place, and she is no longer a shuffling old woman in her robe.

The question, unfortunately, confuses Zieg.  He says nothing. There is nothing for him to say.

She tries again.  “Are you not comfortable?”

There is something almost gallant about her continuing to clutch to form’s sake, to the framework of politeness, and there is still so much in what she does of the woman who joined the rebellion against her brother because so many insisted that it was the right thing to do. 

Melbu Frahma, however, had been polite to the very end, and Charle lacks her brother’s patience.

She did not fully expect him to respond, and when he does, she recoils.

“I am,” he says, then pauses. The words linger uncomfortably air before he finally settles on what he hopes would be an appropriate response. “Comfortable.”

His tone is bizarrely puzzled.

Charle’s chest rises and falls steadily. Her maroon eyes are narrowed, her pupils shunk to mere pinpoints.

It occurs to him that she is, perhaps, angry at him specifically. This confuses him still further. But confusion is ultimately wearying, and he does not try to hold on to it for long. In any case his attention is compromised, and Charle has never held any great appeal. 

Her next words reach him as if through a veil. “-tell me that yourise one night in ten. That not a single one of them knows how you managed to find your sword, nor how you made your way through the city with it undetected, and they do not  _know,”_ she pauses, “Why you do not simply do as you are-  _look at me when I am speaking to you.”_

Her voice suddenly cracks like a whip in the small confines of that room. Charle had owned many slaves in her youth- the habits of mastery have not worn away over time- and at some point during her speech Zieg’s attention had drifted yet again. His head had turned a fraction of an inch away from the opposite wall. South, and a little east.

The offense is too much for Charle.

It is difficult to say exactly what prompts her next action. Perhaps it is an attempt to take the matter in hand. Perhaps she thinks the strength in her bloodline is greater than that of his handlers. Perhaps, and this is considerably closer to the mark, she could tolerate many things from him, including the wanton destruction of the entire coastline of Mille Seseau, but disrespect is not one of them.

The diamonds at her wrists and ears wink like tiny stars as she crosses the room in three angry strides and reaches out to grip him by the collar and lock him down into stasis until she can decide what to do with him. Her mouth is pinched and bloodless, the cords in her neck prominent with fury as she does the one thing that no one in millennia has done and digs her fingers into the naked skin of his neck.

His reaction is nothing less than abrupt.

When she comes to, there is blood in her mouth.

She is propped against the wall, crumpled by the force of impact. Her eyes are dazed, and it is a struggle to focus them. When she finally manages it, her field of vision is swallowed by the sight of Zieg standing in the center of the room.

His is threading his sword through his belt, paying her absolutely no mind.

Charle cradles her wrist to her chest. Her bones are as brittle as old pottery. He had broken them before her fingers could tighten on his neck.

Her throat works, dry. Her eyes are as wide as mirrors, reflecting only an ancient and suffocating terror. 

“Were we ever able to hold you?”

To her credit, she sounds composed.

He adjusts his armor. He has only donned as much as he can without the help of his handlers- there are too many straps for him to reach. His every move is mechanical and unhurried, but it is as if some long forgotten gear has clicked into place and all sluggishness has since been stripped away.

It is an apt question. 

He cannot stay, after all. There is no question of his being allowed to stay. The backlash of her failed spell as he had shrugged out of the binding could be felt halfway through the city. He had ripped through it as easily as if it has been spider web. If Zieg had been given no choice but to react, Ulara can do no less.

He has very little time now,

Charle is old, and very small, and it doesn’t seem possible that she could shrink even more than she already has, but then Zieg straightens and turns and she does. She does.

He gleams like red gold in the dim light, his sword hanging heavily at his hip. There is a rightness to that feeling, a surety.

He does look at her then, even if it appears he is noticing her for the first time.

 “I’m going,” he says. Perhaps, to him, it is all the answer Charle will require.

And then he is through the door and he is gone, not even pausing when he steps over her legs.

Ulara is teeming like an anthill when he emerges from the palace, and still the itch vibrates along his skin with every slow beat of his heart. He needs no adrenaline to fuel the change, no fury; he simply reaches and his other form is there waiting to wrap him in fire and chitin and the long-forgotten dust of Kadessa.

He tears a comet’s path across the sky and lets instinct tug him where it will- south, and a little east.

**0.-0.-0**

By the time he reaches the lands of his youth, there is no space left for him around the roar.

The blood has thickened in his veins and seems to have centered behind his eyes; something is here, something has always been here. There is no room for doubt now. He ought to have left a decade ago. He ought to have hied his way south as soon as his feet had left the bloodied deck. He has bound himself to this for eleven thousand years-  _he has let himself be bound_ \- and thinking had never been his strong suit as a man but now there is no room for thought.

He does not sleep, he does not tire. He had searched Mille Seseau just this way, and when he had located what he sought, he had had that place burnt. And when that had failed, he had had the next place burnt. And the next, and the next, until he finally touched down on a ship in the western seas to finish it by his own hand. With fire and sword he finished it; with fire and sword he will finish it again.

War has already touched here; he cannot help but notice that from the skies. A village lies gutted by fire a little to the west. A banner of smoke unfurls skyward and the smell of charred stone and flesh reaches him, but this does not make him pause. There is no voice in his head anymore, just blood in his ears and pooling in the space behind his eyes until the entire landscape is seen through a veil of red.

The only thing fit to break him from his path, however momentarily, is a glitter of green below.

He alights on a stone outcropping high on the ridge that overlooks the scorched remains of the village. His wings shred from his back; his dragonskin pulls away from his flesh. The pounding of blood behind his eyes does not cease, it does not let up for a second, and even now he feels the pull.

But it is a memory, and he will always be snared by memory.

The forest shudders, the trees parting drunkenly, and the dragon appears below. Pus drips from his jaws and crusts under his eyes. There are hanging growths along his jaw and chest that shine with poison. Syuveil would be appalled to see his glittering dragonfly so grotesquely overgrown.

He feels no kinship to that lurching creature below, no flicker of curiosity, and certainly no sympathy. He remembers him, that is all.

A phrase swims up from nowhere to pluck weakly at his collar.  _A torch to light the way. Feyrbrand._

History has never rewarded lightbringers, and time has not rewarded Feyrbrand. He is old, crippled, and mad. But there is a touch of frenzy in his madness that Zieg recognizes even this far away; the dragon is not destroying trees at random in his fury. He is hunting.

Feyrbrand hisses and shoulders a tree aside, sending poison flying in a wide swathe. It smokes as it hits the greenery, biting deep. A wound from his teeth will not heal, and the poison is carried through the blood. An amputation of a bitten limb will see the stump turned soft and black in a matter of days. Zieg has seen Winglies hit full-force with this poison; he has seen their faces slip free like the flesh of a rotten peach. Whatever Feyrbrand is hunting will likely dissolve before he can feed on it.

Zieg has the eye of a predator. It  does not take him long to spot the prey.

The figure vanishes amongst the trees as it flees, appearing only in flashes. There is nothing elegant about its escape, and nothing particularly effective. The worst thing one can do when faced with a dragon is to run, even if the second worst thing is to stand and fight.

The wise thing would be to vanish into the woods, but the target wishes to run flat out, it wishes to eat the ground under its legs, and so it does the unwise thing. It heads for the clearing just beneath the ridge where Zieg is perched, slipping and stumbling over the uneven ground,

and he has a moment where he thinks that perhaps it is better to die on one’s feet when given the option, none of them had died on their feet save Shirley, even Rose had not-

The roar has never been louder, the pull has never been stronger, it is not an itch now but a conflagration ripping across his skin howling that  _something is wrong, something has always been wrong, it is here._  The dragon taking its meal does not interest him, an ignoble death on the forest floor does not interest him but now there is a woman running across an open field and her hair flying out behind her is as black as tar.

And the roar stutters and cuts out with a wet crackle and all is terrible yawning silence

**0.-0.-0**

The collar is of Charle’s make, but even she is not truly aware of its nature. She considers it nothing more than the iron ring that binds him to the wall, allowing him only so much room to bite and lunge and no more. If he is the hunting hawk on her wrist, then she designed the collar to be the jesses that she can yank to reinforce the bond between them.

In the earliest years, the collar was all that stood between Zieg and his increasing attempts to bash his own brains out on the nearest doorframe. If he is what prevents Soa’s divine plan from being realized, then the collar is what prevents him from realizing the sum total of his actions. To lead a beast through a burning barn, first you must bind its eyes in cloth. The world burns and the collar pulls him through it, one step and one century at a time, and it is perhaps the greatest mercy the Winglies ever devised for him.

Her face is turned to him now and he knows her, he has known her forever, the weight of her has rocked through him and torn out every floorboard. The collar around his neck tightens to the point of strangulation, stretched to the very limit of its power, and behind its cold black band a wall of indescribable emotion rises up to blot out the sky.

Feyrbrand has reached the clearing. He will be on her in seconds. 

Time seems to have slowed to a lurching crawl, and Zieg watches her slow with it. 

He watches her turn. He watches the heavy weight of her hair snap behind her like a battle pennant. Her sword is too heavy, her armor is too heavy, she carries it wrong, but he is in the grip of something far too powerful for Charle’s gift now. 

The collar emits a sound like the snapping of a violin string and a smell like burning hair and Zieg is moving faster than he has in his entire life, fast enough to save a life.

She is snatched off of the very ground mere seconds before the dragon reaches her. When her eyes turn to face him, they reflect no fear, only a wide and guileless blue.

**0.-0.-0**


End file.
